A Tale of Two Mars Hill ChurchesSo far in this series - and in other posts I've written - I've been exploring and/or alluding to root issues in Christian thinking which I believe have led to many problems. In this post, I'd like to explain what Christian Mysticism is all about and why I think it offers solutions to these problems.

But to really get to the heart of the matter, I think the juxtaposition of two stories really illustrates what is going on with the Church in America. That juxtaposition lies in the contrast between what happened with the pastors of two very different "Mars Hill" churches.

In February of 1999, Rob Bell founded a church called "Mars Hill", which originally met in a gym in Wyoming, MI. Within a year, the church was given a shopping mall in Grandville, MI, and they bought the surrounding land. The church quickly grew to "mega-church" numbers, with 11,000 in attendance by 2005. Rob Bell was a rock star. His books made the top seller list, and Bell made No. 10 on the magazine TheChurchReport.com's list, "The 50 Most Influential Christians in America", in 2007, and then in June 2011, Bell was named by Time Magazine as one of the "2011 Time 100", the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

And Bell was not simply a shallow Christian riding the wave of fame. Bell believed in practicing what he preached, and that's why - as James Wellman explains in "Rob Bell and a New American Christianity" - Rob Bell moved his family into a Grand Rapids ghetto, questioning how some churches "spend 20 million on remodels while 20 percent of the Grand Rapids population lives in poverty".

This story makes for a striking contrast, I believe, with another church named "Mars Hill" - the one founded by Mark Driscoll in Seattle, WA. This Mars Hill church also grew very quickly, and their pastor - Driscoll - also sold many books. But over the years, many stories of abuse surfaced - there are entire websites (such as joyfulexiles.com and driscollcontroversy.com) that are dedicated to documenting these stories. Finally, even some of the co-pastors began to tell stories of abuse. In the fall of 2013, plagiarism charges began to surface, regarding some of Driscoll's books. This sparked the protest of many former members of the church, and the abuse allegations seemed to spring up by the dozens.

On August 24, 2014, Driscoll announced that he would take a hiatus from his pastorship for six weeks while charges against him were investigated. On September 7th of the same year, the church announced layoffs due to financial strain, and on October 14th, Driscoll stepped down. But the Mars Hill board just didn't seem to get it - while they admitted his personal problems, they did not "believe him to be disqualified from pastoral ministry", for the reasoning that he did not teach false doctrine. It didn't matter that Driscoll had hurt many people over the years and had deep character flaws - what mattered to them was that his doctrinal teachings matched a checklist.So here we have a sharp contrast. On the one side, you have a church that fell apart because their pastor challenged an idea, and it didn't matter that this pastor sought to practice his teachings of love. On the other side, you have a church that refused to face the allegations of abuse for years, and even after their pastor's career fell apart they defended him.In my mind, this highlights the biggest problem in the church - the idea that what matters most is our ideas. In this paradigm, having all the right ideas is not only what matters the most, but it is the basis for salvation, and the distinguishing characteristic that differentiates between Christians and non-Christians. Practice is secondary, in this paradigm.

But there are some issues with this paradigm - issues coming both from scripture, and from science. Let's start with the science.

In Two Minds

I think it's a little more nuanced...but you get the general idea.

Have you ever heard someone say that they were "in two minds" in regard to a difficult decision, or a topic that requires deep thought? The expression refers to being able to see the pros and cons of more than one decision or position, and finding them to be more or less equally balanced. But there is some very interesting science that points to the idea that we all really do possess two minds.Most people in this day and age have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the idea of "left brain" vs. "right brain". We know that the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and is dominant in the areas of logic, mathematics, fact retrieval, and language. And the right hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body and is dominant in the areas of creative thinking, art and music, spacial abilities, and facial recognition. This is, of course, a very simplified version of things - it's not as if the right hemisphere is incapable of thinking logically, or the left brain incapable of thinking creatively. But they seem to work in ways that are different from each other.

What most people don't know is the story of the man we owe this knowledge to - Dr. Roger Sperry. Sperry had performed research on cats, severing their corpus callosum - a bundle of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres - and training them to distinguish shapes with one eye covered. He found that when he covered the eye they had learned with and uncovered the other eye, they no longer remembered how to discern the shapes. The result of severing the corpus callosum was then termed "split-brain".Later on, Sperry developed the idea to use the operation to sever the corpus callosum for patients with severe epilepsy - the theory was that the epileptic seizures of certain patients was being caused by a feedback loop between the two hemispheres of the brain, and that severing this nerve bundle would stop these feedback loops from occurring. When this operation was performed, at first it seemed that nothing had changed with these patients, except the absence of seizures. But over time, some odd behavior began to surface. Some patients reported being unable to control their left hand - as if it had a mind of its own. One patient described an event where he had gone to hug his wife, and his left hand slapped her!This spawned some very interesting research. One type of experiment involved having the patient look at an object with the right eye covered, and then asking the patient to describe what they had seen - they could not. But when asked to draw the object, they were able to comply. It seems that though the left hemisphere - which controls speech - could not describe the object, the right hemisphere - which controls creative thought and spatial recognition - could draw it. Other research involved asking a patient questions, and giving the right brain scrabble letters to work with - the researchers would often get different answers between what the patient would say through speech and what they would spell with the scrabble letters. In one case, a man was asked what he wanted to do for a career. His left brain uttered that he hoped to become a draftsman - a very practical career. His right brain spelled out the words "race-car driver".

Perhaps there is truth to the oft-heard statement that “inside him, there is someone yearning to be free.” This means that the two hemispheres may even have different beliefs. For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: “If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Ramachandran's query ought to be haunting for anyone who believes that the priority for Christians - the basis for determining if you are a Christian or not, and the basis for salvation - is having the right ideas and the right words to express them.Perhaps even more disturbing is the possibility that we could one day develop Alzheimer's disease - a brain related malady that not only makes it so that patients have difficulty developing new memories, but over time begins to destroy old memories. Often, patients with Alzheimer's cannot even remember their own children. If salvation is based on our ideas, then what happens to people who have forgotten that they were Christians because of Alzheimer's? And if they go to hell because of their disease, which took away their correct ideas, then might it be the most merciful thing to kill an Alzheimer's patient before the disease progresses to the point where they begin to forget their Christianity? (Of course, you know that I would answer "no" to this question, as I am about to argue that it is not our ideas which save us in the first place.)

Or perhaps we need to learn to embrace our inner atheist - to love those parts of ourselves that we hide, even from ourselves?

Examine the FruitsBut science is not the only area that causes conundrums for the paradigm of idea-priority. The Bible also challenges this paradigm.

Fra Angelico's depiction of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats

Perhaps the most important passage is Matthew 25:31-46 - known as the parable of the sheep and the goats. In this passage, we find that there is one group of people who seem to have all the right ideas and the right words to express them. They know who Jesus is, and they know what to say to him - "Lord, Lord!", they exclaim. It is as if they are saying "see? Look at how I'm using the right words in order to demonstrate that my Theology is correct!" And yet these people go off to judgment - why? Because they failed to show kindness.Meanwhile, on the other side, you have a group of people who seem baffled that they have been selected as members of the kingdom. But Jesus says that whenever these people have shown kindness to "the least of these", they have done it to him, and therefore they belong in the kingdom. This undercuts the paradigm of right-ideas! The basis for determining the difference between sheep and goats has nothing at all to do with ideas, and everything to do with conduct in this story!

Another story that throws out this challenge is the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). In this story, Jesus deliberately chooses to use the priest and the Levite - members in high standing of the religious elite - as examples of people who acted in a manner that was not righteous. But he provocatively chooses to use a despised member of another religion - a Samaritan (the relationship between Jews and Samaritans would not have been unlike the one between Christians and Muslims today - enemies who share many of the same scriptures and beliefs) - as an example of righteous behavior!

Note here, as well, how 2 Chron. 28:15 seems to act as a prelude for the parable of the Sheep and the Goats - it says that some Samaritans "got up and took the captives, and with the booty they clothed all that were naked among them; they clothed them, gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho, the city of palm trees. Then they returned to Samaria." It seems that the combination of the parables of the "Good Samaritan" and the "Sheep and the Goats" may act as a challenge from Jesus to the religious power structure of his day that they have the wrong paradigm - they are more concerned with "right belief" and "purity", while the "heretical Samaritans" are more concerned with "right action" - and this is what God cares more about.

Another passage where Jesus challenges the right-idea paradigm is in Matthew 7:15-20, where he tells us that we can know a false prophet by their fruits. This was not a way of saying that as long as someone said all the right things, they were good - this was a way of talking about a person's conduct and character! If it is not obvious from the mere fact that fruits are what a plant produces, then it should be made so by the fact that Paul describes the "fruit of the Spirit" in Galatians 5:22-23 as "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." In other words, if your ideas are producing more of these character traits, then you're on the right track - but if they are not, and especially if they are producing fruits that are the opposite of these things (hatred, anger, mean-spiritedness, etc.), then you're on the wrong track and you need to reexamine yourself. I'd say that this challenges us to rethink the tale of two Mars Hill Churches.

Also in Matthew, Jesus tells another story about a wise builder and a foolish builder in Matthew 7:24-27 - and he starts the story by saying that everyone who hears his words and acts on them are like the wise man! It isn't enough to hear and then get all the right ideas - you must act! Furthermore, this passage comes immediately after a very challenging passage in Matthew 7:21-23:

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’[emphasis mine]

The entire book of James functions as a challenge to the paradigm of idea-priority - as James 2:14-19 says:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Elsewhere in this book, James says that "pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father" is helping orphans and widows (James 1:27) - I have argued before that this is one of the ways that the Bible talks about social justice. And in James 3:13, it says:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.

The author of I John also draws a contrast between words and deeds in verse 3:18:

Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

All too often, our modern version of Church has put all the emphasis on ritual and liturgy, but this does not mesh well with the life of Jesus. As William Barclay puts it in his commentary on Matthew (vol. 2):

Jesus insisted that the greatest ritual service is the service of human need. It is an odd thing to think that, with the possible exception of that day in the synagogue at Nazareth, we have no evidence that Jesus ever conducted a ‘church’ service in all his life on earth, but we have abundant evidence that he fed the hungry and comforted the sad and cared for the sick. Christian service is not the service of any liturgy or ritual; it is the service of human need. Christian service is not monastic retreat; it is involvement in all the tragedies and problems and demands of the human situation.

One wonders why no one in church history has ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved.

Yet if love is to be placed above all other considerations (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8), if nothing has any value apart from love (1 Cor. 13:1–3), and if the only thing that matters is faith working in love (Gal. 5:6), how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetrated such things were not only not deemed heretics but often were (and yet are) held up as “heroes of the faith”?

Judaism has an interesting take on heresy - I have a friend who grew up in the tradition and is something of a scholar when it comes to the Hebrew language and Talmudic scholarship. He has told me that Judaism is not about belief at all - it is about living according to various traditions and practices. He's said humorously that Judaism is about eating.

In a later post, we will discuss Pardes - the Jewish method for interpreting scripture. Pardes is a way of sayingparadise, since it means "garden", and conjures up the imagery of the Garden of Eden (additionally, the English paradisecame from this word). There is a well known Jewish legend which says that four Rabbis entered pardes - they entered paradise, which my friend said is "a term for knowing the entire Tora". Of the four, Ben Azzai died, Ben Zoma went mad, Elisha ben Abiyuh (nicknamed Akher, which means the other) became a heretic, and only Rabbi Akiva came out unscathed. My friend says of this story: "yet we follow all of them."

The story goes on that Akher (the heretic, the other) taught a revered theologian named Rabbi Meir, who is, according to my friend, "one of the most prominent scholars in the Mishna, which is the basis of the Talmud." One Sabbath, Rabbi Meir and Akher were traveling and arguing, which was quite usual for them to do since Rabbi Meir recognized Akher's heresy. The heretic was riding a donkey and Meir was walking, since riding is forbidden on the Sabbath. Meir was listening with such intensity to Akher's words that he hadn't noticed how far they had walked - he didn't notice that they had reached a ritual boundary beyond which Jews were forbidden to pass on the Sabbath. Akher stopped at the boundary and said "Look, we have reached the boundary - we must part now: You must not accompany me any farther - go back!"

The story is an interesting one as it is used to illustrate the importance of avoiding shunning our heretics - as the story goes, even though Akher is a heretic, we follow him. His wisdom is still important - we don't simply throw everything he's said out because of a few things deemed heretical. Rather, his words are carefully analyzed and wrestled with - he provides important questions to ponder. And in some ways, Akher was a better Jew than many "Orthodox" Jews because of his respect for the practices, and the way he sought justice through his life.

Be-loving JesusWhen you examine the history of the early church, in the first through third century, you find that this emphasis on having the right ideas seems to be curiously absent. In fact, there was a strong emphasis on practice.

Justin Martyr (c. 100 - 165) spoke about how the teachings of Jesus were practiced when he said:

We who formerly…valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possession, now bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to everyone in need; we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies.

St. Athanasius (296/298 - 373) believed that one could not even hope to understand the principles of theology without proper practice:

Anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds.

The School of Alexandria has a practice many modern Christians would find curious - one of the main purposes of the school was to prepare its pupils for Baptism. In other words, Baptism did not happen until the students had demonstrated that they were prepared. As Origen (184/185 - 253/254) - a highly influential early Christian writer and student of Alexandria - wrote:

If you want to receive Baptism, you must first learn about God’s Word, cut away the roots of your vices, correct your barbarous wild lives and practice meekness and humility.

The early historian Rufinus (340/345 - 410) once wrote about a Christian community that draws a sharp and shocking contrast to society, and demonstrated Christ's love in an amazing way:

Then we came to Nitria, the best-known of all the monasteries of Egypt, about forty miles from Alexandria…. As we drew near to that place and they realized that foreign brethren were arriving, they poured out of their cells like a swarm of bees and ran to meet us with delight and alacrity, many of them carrying containers of water and of bread…. When they had welcomed us, first of all they led us with psalms into the church and washed our feet and one by one they dried them with the linen cloth they were girded with, as if to wash away the fatigue of the journey…. What can I say that would do justice to their humanity, their courtesy, and their love? Nowhere have I seen love flourish so greatly, nowhere with such quick compassion, such eager hospitality.

It seems that the early Christian communities took John 14:15 very seriously ("If you love me, you will keep my commandments."). And what did Jesus command? That we love one another as he loved us (John 13:34). Indeed, Jesus and Paul both declared that love sums up the law (Mt. 22:37-40, Rom. 13:10, Gal. 5:14), and I John 4:8 and 16 declare that God is love. St. Augustine wrote in his Enchiridon that "all the commandments of God are embraced in love." He goes on to describe how the end of following the Way of Jesus is love and every practice "has love for its aim."

What About Justification by Grace Through Faith?The protestant instinct might be to ask: what about justification by grace through faith, as the popular Pauline phrase goes?

First off, I do not believe Paul's purpose in Romans was to say that works - in and of themselves - are bad and/or worthless. Rather, I think Paul is preaching against works-without-faith. Also, I think he is also speaking specifically in his context - he's talking about the debate which was current in his time over whether or not gentile Christian converts had to be circumcised and adopt a Jewish kosher diet, as if doing so were what mattered and what justified them.Secondly, I also believe we must form a better understanding of what faith in a Roman world meant. In the historical context in which Paul wrote about "justification by grace through faith", cities would seek the favor of Rome by paying tribute - called pistis, translated "faith" - to Rome. They would build monuments to Caesar, temples, etc., in order to show their loyalty or allegiance to Rome, and often the temples they built would generate revenue for Roman taxes. Thus, the word translated "faith" has more in common with allegiance, loyalty, or fidelity. This is not a "works-less" concept - it doesn't mean "inserting ideas into your head and insisting they are true." It has much more to do with how you live your life than the modern concept behind the word "faith".

You cannot have love without show, but you can always have show without love.

And after all, we cannot hide behind Paul's concept of "justification by faith" when he says the following in Romans 2:13:

For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified.

Additionally, it should be noted that if one believes - as is all too often the case in Protestant circles, it seems - that having faith (interpreted as insisting that the "right ideas" are true) magically results in God's righteousness being deposited into one's account, we run into problems in 2 Corinthians, where Paul presents a vision of Christians being transformed into the image of the glory of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:18), their "inner nature... being renewed" (2 Cor. 4:16), and becoming a "new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17). The "faith" Paul speaks of is supposed to result in transformation, and if it doesn't, there is a problem!

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

What is Mysticism?Meditating on how the law is summed up in love and how God is love is a wonderful tie-in to explaining what mysticism is. Mysticism is about much more than belief - it is about practicing faith in such a way that one comes to actually experiencing the Presence of God.

Christian mysticism is not the same as ordinary religious belief or observance. It has room for profound doubt and insistent questioning. It does not ask you to check your mind at the door and submit your will to some sort of external authority - whether that be a church, a priest or minister, or a book . Rather, Christian mysticism argues that any respect you pay to external authority can emerge only from a profound inner experience or conviction that God is real and present, and that it is both possible and plausible for the average person to have a truly experiential relationship with God.

[M]ysticism
is union with God. A mystic is one who lives in union or communion with
God. The difference between union and communion is relatively minor:
the first involves a sense of “one-ness” with God; the second, a sense
of connection with the sacred that is deep, close, and intimate, even
though a sense of “two-ness” remains.

Most mystics have mystical experiences—by which we mean ecstatic experiences in which there is a vivid sense of the presence of God, or the Sacred, or the Real, terms that we use interchangeably here. An ecstatic experience, as the roots of the Greek word suggest, is a nonordinary state of consciousness. One is “out of” or “beyond” ordinary consciousness and in this state has an overwhelming sense of experiencing God. God becomes an experiential reality. In this sense, mystics know God. They do not simply believe in God, but have moved from believing to knowing.

Contemplate the Mystery of the Universe

Mysticism is all about possibility - "the more". It doesn’t have to deny rational thought or science, but works with it while also going beyond and asking "what else?" The illumination of the mystic is not a denial of reality, but is an enlightenment that enables the mystic to see things the way they really are. It’s not about seeing visions and hearing voices - though this is in the realm of possibility for the mystic, and when a mystic has such experiences they are for the purpose of exposing reality and illuminating in the way I've just described. But while such visions are possible, one can be a mystic without ever having such an experience, or one could be a mystic while having attributed such an experience to psychological explanation. St. John of the Cross actually felt that supernatural phenomenon were problematic because they could have so easily come from the ego’s need to feel important and special.

To think more about the "experience of God" - consider the following analogy which came from an essay by Arthur Eddington: Eddington asks his readers to consider the idea of analyzing a joke scientifically in order to determine if it is in fact a joke - much in the same way that a scientist might analyze a chemical compound in order to determine if it is in fact a chemical salt. Upon concluding that it is, in fact, a joke, would we still laugh? Or would the act of having gone through the analysis have robbed us of the inclination to laugh? He concludes:

And as laughter cannot be compelled by the scientific exposition of the structure of a joke, so a philosophic discussion of the attributes of God (or an impersonal substitute) is likely to miss the intimate response of the spirit which is the central point of the religious experience.

This is why so much of mystical practice has focused on methods for recognizing and experiencing the presence of God, rather than analyzing God. But because we so often have analytical minds that are constantly seeking to understand, mystical writing seeks to confound this analysis through delving into the mystery of the paradoxical nature of God.

The paradox of mysticism itself is that the more it reveals, the more it conceals. It opens you up to the experience of God while at the same time forcing you to give up all your idolatrous concepts of God - it is almost as if the more you know God, the less you are able to claim to know for sure about God. Mysticism is meant to point people to an experiential knowledge of the presence of God - to draw its adherents into the mystery of the infinite Being. As I noted in the first section of this series, the word translated "repent" (metanoia) means "to go beyond/to expand the mind". So when one ponders the ultimate Mystery that is God, one must constantly go beyond and expand on our current understanding.

When we seek to understand the mystery of God, we must always keep in mind that it is just that - it is mystery. There is an ancient Indian parable that has crossed into many religious traditions about a group of blind men and an elephant. None of these men have ever experienced an elephant, and they have no idea what it is like - so they go and touch this elephant to find out. In one version of the story, one man, touching the leg, declares that an elephant is like a pillar. Another, touching the trunk, says he is wrong - an elephant is like a snake. Another, touching its tusk, declares that an elephant is like a spear. Each man, touching a different portion of the elephant, has a different experience of the elephant. The point of the story is that none of these men are wrong, but neither are any of them completely right - they all only have a piece of the picture. And if they could put aside their ego and stop arguing long enough to find out why each of the other men "see" the elephant differently, they could have a broader, more complete experience of what an elephant is. This is a very good way, I feel, of understanding why we must respect the mystery of God.

I think Pope John XXIII put this well:

[When one] attempts to convey something of God’s holy otherness he tries one earthly simile after another. In the end he discards them all as inadequate and says apparently wild and senseless things meant to startle the heart into feeling what lies beyond the reaches of the brain. Something of the kind takes place here: “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what things God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). [These realities beyond understanding] can be brought closer only by the overthrow of everything naturally comprehensible. Flung into a world of new logic, we are forced to make a genuine effort to understand.

I define myself above all other things as a believer. I am indeed a passionate believer. God is the ultimate reality in my life. I live in a constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence. I sometimes think of myself as one who breathes the very air of God or, to borrow an image from the East, as one who swims in the infinite depths of the sea of God. Like the psalmist of old, I have the sense of God’s inescapableness. I am what I would call a God-intoxicated human being. Yet, when I seek to put my understanding of this God into human words, my certainty all but disappears. Human words always contract and diminish my God awareness. They never expand it.

One of the wondrous things about emphasizing practices which lead to an experience of God is that the more we practice, the more we begin to shine with the light of God - "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John 3:30)

This has been termed "deification", and has been described with the analogy that with the practices, we become like a polished pane of glass which the sunlight may then shine through. With this concept, our sin is not what defines us, but is merely the dirt covering the glass and making it opaque.

Bishop Irenaeus - a second century Christian - taught that "God became man, so man could become like God." He further explained that "Christ became what we are, so that He might bring us to be what He Himself is." Irenaeus was probably the first Christian theologian to teach deification, but he was by no means the only. One of his contemporaries, Clement of Alexandria, said:

The Logos of God had become man so that you might learn how a man may become God.

Inverses 12-13 of John 1, the gospel writes that "to all who received him", God "gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God." Meister Eckhart, writing about this passage in "The Book of Divine Comfort",teaches this idea of deification when he writes of "agents of the soul" which, "being created with the soul, are not God" and "must be changed, transformed into God, reborn in Him and of him, so that only God is Father and they, too, become his sons, his only-begotten sons. For I am God's son when I have been born and formed in his image."

I believe that this idea of deification was what Jesus was alluding to when he said in John 15:4 that if we abide in him, he will abide in us. After this, he gives the metaphor of how a branch cannot bear fruit without abiding in the vine. This picture shows that we must live in the way of Jesus in order to become like him, and only then can we experience the Presence - or the in-dwelling - of God.

Indeed, within the context of first century Rome where there were so many stories of deified human beings, many passages would have been heard by this audience as pointing to deification. For example, in Luke 22:29-30, Jesus says that "just as My Father has granted Me a kingdom, I grant you that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (emphasis mine) And the book of Revelation has Jesus saying (Rev. 3:21) that "He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne." In a first century context where there were many stories of deified humans whom had been given power and dominion by the gods, these verses would have been heard as pointing to a Christian version of deification - which indeed, the quotes I have provided from early Church fathers demonstrate.

I think it important to note that I am not speaking of a performance driven Christianity where we are always afraid about whether or not we are doing enough. This is not what we see when we look at how the disciples were treated while they were following Jesus. When we look at the picture of Peter's journey especially (which I wrote about in more detail here), we see that he was always messing up, and yet he was very close to Jesus and was accepted by him. That is why I use the word practice - in the same sense that when we train in athletics or musical instruments, we practice, and practice makes perfect.

Even more than the fact that this is a practice, it is the practice of love, which includes forgiveness - not only of others when they fail, but of ourselves as well.

About Me

I am married to a gorgeous woman
who makes life beautiful. I have three children who are the loves of my
life. I am learning more about love every day. My family and I moved
to Chattanooga in December 2010 and are loving it! We've been attending
The Vineyard and are feeling like we are more a part of that church
than we have of any church in a long time. I am a music snob which
means that I hate any radio station that plays just hits resulting in
the same dozen or so songs repeated every hour. I reject the politics of persecution and oppose absolutist, demonizing rhetoric. I am a geek/nerd.

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NLT

If
I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love
others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had
the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and
possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move
mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave
everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast
about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.